Some Testimonials

Some Testimonials

“I am very impressed with Rationale as a tool to assist students in improving the structure of their analytical essays… Rationale greatly assists our staff in implementing the higher order thinking skills that are essential to improving student learning.”Catherine O’Kane,St Rita’s College

“In a word, I think Rationale is awesome! I have been struggling in my doctoral thesis to demonstrate a significant degree of competency in critical thinking. After working my way through the first set of 12 online exercises, I really feel clearer in my mind about structuring and presenting my arguments to my supervisor. Furthermore, I find the user interface is clear, friendly, uncluttered, and just makes me want to play. Congratulations on a superb intellectual tool!”Steve Hinge,ICT Project Manager, Infrastructure Services, NorthTec

“I am glad to have a product to capture my thought process in a way that is a step above just a mind map. Mind map software can capture the same thoughts, but your system organizes the thoughts in a automated way that I was looking for in a program.”Paul Trebian,University of Phoenix

“I’ve been looking for an effective way to teach critical thinking for 10 years – Rationale is far and away the most promising option I’ve ever seen.”Steve Crowley,Boise State University

“I like your argument graphics for their simplicity, their clarity, and aesthetic design, and above, all I believe that students or corporate folks would feel inspired to use them.”Marlys Mayfield,College of Alameda, California

“fun to use…. A very good tool for students learning rhetoric, debating, logic, or composition.”Larry O’Brien,in his review of Rationale at Knowing.net

“Rationale™ is magic when it comes to thinking through a problem… To my great delight I found that argument mapping could be fun as well as eye opening… If I had had Rationale™ in college… my thinking skills would’ve been finely tuned and problem solving would have become a much more rewarding pursuit. Now my ideas are more accurate and better articulated.”Chet Dailey,Rationale user

“one specially ambitious new offering…”James Fallows,Eminent journalist James Fallows talks about Rationale™ in his technology column (the last four paragraphs of page two). (Subscription required, or email us and we can send you a temporary link)

“An outstanding product with a broad range of curriculum applications. The visual nature of this software will prove very valuable in assisting my students to organise their thinking”Garry Chapman,Assistant Director of Curriculum, Ivanhoe Grammar School.

“Your new software is genuinely dazzling – both at a practical level and at a theoretical level. Congratulations!”Peter Tillers,tillers.net/home.html, Professor of Law, Yeshiva University

” Before Rationale, I was only able to lecture at my students about the skill of evaluating arguments. After Rationale, I have the technology I need to help them actually acquire the skill.”Gary Comstock,Professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University

“Once they start to see this as a normal, natural way to think through their essay plan, the quality of their essays jumps noticeably. Students who were baffled at first start to feel that they really can do this stuff. That’s magic.”Mark Matcott,Lilydale High School

“It’s not just for lawyers. Argument mapping is such a fundamental skill in business.”Simon Uthmeyer,Phillips Fox Lawyers

“Wow, it was a real joy to work with the program, it really goes a long way to answering all my previous wishes, and offers lots of unlooked for delights as well.”Dr. Geoff Hyde,National Centre for Biological Sciences, India

“Rationale’s argument mapping techniques have enhanced DSE’s policy capability by improving the logic with which we tackle the sustainability policy task.”Scott Rawlings,Principal Analyst, Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria

– “Slow thinking in the age of twitter, in which velocity is more important than the truth, seeking the essence of things. It offers students a concrete method to enable them to build up a transparent structure in a report and/or advice. Moreover, it teaches them to reason instead of to react”.Niels van Maaren, teacher of Communication at Fontys Hogeschool, The Netherlands

– “The method (CTwR) makes you aware of the fact that sometimes you are too much involved in surface things with your students and focus too little on the underlying errors in thinking and reasoning. It`s like the tip of an iceberg, which is only 10% of what you can see. This means that you see that these kinds of mistakes are made, but you have no means to address them in a fundamental way in terms of idiom and method. As a consequence, you make too little progress with your students as far as learning how to think is concerned.
This method makes it possible not only to detect mistakes, or have them detected, but above all to support students in learning how to think and give this process structure.
A very strong point of the method is its presentation in visual form. It really gives you the necessary support in analysis and building up arguments.”Majel Ruyters, program coordinator of Communication at Fontys Hogeschool, the Netherlands

– “These days students get many writing assignments, for instance an argument or literature study. By having him make an argument map, as a summary, it`s much easier to assess whether the student has built up the argument properly and what the quality is of the use of sources. Argument maps are good tools to give depth to an assignment”.Lia van Stralen, lecturer of Healthcare at Hogeschool Utrecht, The Netherlands

– One of Mariël Kanne`s (lecturer in a master`s course of Advanced Nursing Practice at Hogeschool Utrecht, the Netherlands) students writes to her:

“Here`s another nice story: after the first lesson I downloaded the program and started trying it out enthusiastically. Then my daughter comes home one evening and tells me that you can win a few scholarships at her school (a teacher training college at Nijmegen) for a work-experience period abroad by writing an essay in English, but it has to be handed in this week. Very frustrating, but I`m much too late, I`m not even going to try, she says.
I discuss the matter with her: if everybody thinks like that, you`ll stand a better chance, I`ve got a nice programme here, let`s make an argument map. On Wednesday we made an argument map together, on Thursday she wrote an essay with the help of the programme, had it translated into English by someone she knew, and then handed it in …. And, yes, she got a scholarship. Five-thousand euros, and on 2 January she was off to Atlanta in the US of A for her work-experience period.”

– “I`m convinced that now more than ever before it`s essential for the current generation of students to have better ways of learning how to think compared to the moment when they started their course. In this context better means more structured, more logical and more critical.”Leo van de Pas, lecturer of Communication at Fontys Hogeschool, the Netherlands